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Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Today, we're going to talk about carrots.

Or more specifically, carrot cake. You see, for hundreds of thousands of years, bakers have been trying to hide the taste of carrots - which is most charitably described as "dirt-like"- by mixing it with truckloads of sugar and cream cheese icing. This makes even the most rancid of vegetables - aka, carrots - slightly less disgusting and, of course, extremely healthy.

But how does a baker, who is bound by law to disclose that his cake actually contains putrid dirt veg, tell his customers without making them want to vomit?

Well, there's always lying:

"That's funny; why do these red velvet cupcakes taste like feet?"

Or making it completely illegible:

"Hm. I feel like these orange arrows are trying to tell me something about my Canb cake. But what could it be?!?"

Or the baker can mangle the shape of the aforementioned foul devil vegetable to confuse people:

This way instead of imagining carrots - the ingrown hairs of the earth - in your cake, you can imagine synthetic fur - which is of course a vast improvement.

In the end, though, it's always best to just be honest:

Cak Rot?

Sounds about right to me.

Note: Before the carrot cake coalition comes after me, I should mention that I actually love carrot cake. Carrots, however, are evil like the froo-its of the de-vill. Which just goes to show: if you put enough sugar in something, even the most revolting, repellent, repulsive, sickening, nauseating, stomach-churning, stomach-turning, off-putting, unpalatable, distasteful, foul, nasty, vomitous vegetable known to man can be super duper yummy.

Sorry, but you have it wrong. "The most revolting, repellent, repulsive, sickening, nauseating, stomach-churning, stomach-turning, off-putting, unpalatable, distasteful, foul, nasty, vomitous vegetable known to man" is actually the lima bean.

Rather than being a deformed carrot on top of the chocolate cake, I believe that is the flower of that plant they show on the news from time to time. You know, the flower that smells like rotting meat. That would fit in with your dislike of carrots.

Yay! Another carrot hater, huzzah! I feel vindicated and will now use "ingrown hairs of the earth" as my new catch-phrase to describe them. Carrot cake, however, is delicious especially with a nice cream cheese icing!

The canb cake looks like it says something different to me. U and T instead of A and B. I hate that word, why would someone write something that looks like that? Nice So I married an Axe Murderer quote. The canb cake fits the bill.

I thought I was the only person alive who had lines memorized from "So I Married An Axe Murderer." That is a great movie! Thanks for reminding me of the laughs. To go with my carrot cake, I thought I ordered a LARGE cappuccino. Haha! --Emily

Just so we're clear, there are many varied and wonderfully disgusting vegetables in this world of ours. However, carrots have chosen to single themselves out at every holiday meal by gleefully proclaiming, "Hey! Eat me boiled and mushy! People claim I'm good for you!"

Lima beans and Brussels sprouts know better. They just sit over in a corner, relaxing in a vat of butter and minding their own business. Carrots are the obnoxious second cousins of the vegetable family.

Have you ever seen a pea cake? No...no? That's because not even sugar and cream cheese (or any other delectably sweet thing) can make those nasty little balls of bitter any good. I'd take carrots any day!

I like carrots and carrot cake but I think cream cheese icing is just about the most disgusting thing on the planet (The actual honor goes to Dr. Pepper). Cheese has no place in desert food. And before you ask, Cheese cake is slimy and gross.

You know, I was going to pick up a carrot cake from a local bakery tonight, because we were invited to a friends house for dinner. This bakery makes an amazing version of carrot cake, but I think after this post I am going to get mini cannolis instead.Thanks Cake Wrecks. :)

See, to me, the term redheaded stepchild means more that someone is not related and, of course, carrots are very much a part of the family. They're just the part that nobody likes. They're the obnoxious second cousin who shows up to the party drunk wearing a wife beater and making rude jokes to your 105 year old grandmother, Mrs. Collard Green.

Wow! I have never actually heard someone talk with such hate about carrots--obviously you've never had a good one--if you're eating them from the store, yes they taste like that--if you grow them at home organically, they taste like pure sugar and have none of the feet or dirt taste you mention. I'll keep eating my carrots and have awesome health and eyesight.

I love your vituperous languange, but it is best directed at BELL PEPPERS. And who ever heard of a raw bell pepper cake. There is nothing you can do with a raw bell pepper to make it edible or useful - other than compost it perhaps. BTW, carrots and celery grow best in sandy soil. No "dirt" aftertaste with those. Norine

I lurve carrots myself. Definately in my top 5 fav veggies, especially when baked. My mother makes this fab veggie dish at Thanksgiving with potatoes, onions, and carrots baked together with some salt and pepper... mmmm, I could eat my fill on just that and **** the turkey.

My mother in law's birthday is tonight. I made carrot cake. Now I'm thinking I suck at life ;-) It is super pretty though. I'd like to thank you, Cakewrecks, for making me paranoid. I triple check every single thing I spell on my cakes, and sometimes make my husband check too just to be sure. I'm pretty sure the stress of it has taken at least two years off of my life.

I totally agree with the stomach churning monstrosity known as the carrot, and the fact that they can be yummy if baked into a good cake. Love the "cak rot" cakes. What in the world was the wreckerator thinking?

Hmm...I must be one of the weird ones. I LOVE carrots. One of my favorite veggies. The only way I don't like them is when they are candied. yuck. However, I do love carrot cake! I think I am going to go have a snack now of RAW carrots....lol

The third cake isn't carrot by any means. Its chocolate...with a sad orange flower on top for decoration. But it's delicious and carrot free....I know this because I live off of this delicious cake found at Vons. Are we allowed to say names, point fingers, and say they draw crappy flowers? Oops...I just did

Actually, carrots aren't good for rabbits, either; the amount of sugar in them is too high for rabbits to eat in anything but very small amounts. The carrot greens, on the other hand, are perfect rabbit food.

Personally, I've always loved carrots, raw or cooked. I tend to avoid carrot cake because it often has nuts in or on it, and I hate nuts. I probably would have been turned off by carrot cake as well if any of them had looked like those pics.

Fortunately for me, carrots that taste like dirt have been, in my experience, the rare exception. But you have to get good ones, and use them before they start to go bad, and prepare them correctly. If you're just going to boil them, you may as well serve paper pulp instead.

Parsnips do tend to taste a lot more like dirt. I wonder if a parsnip cake would be any good. I bet the natural sweetness of carrots makes them a better choice. I think a lot of holiday dinners include a boiled combination of parsnips and carrots, which probably doesn't do much good for either one.

I also think a lot of people maintain a theoretical hatred of certain foods when they've only had a particularly bad variety or preparation, e.g. hating apples when you've only tried Granny Smiths. My mom thought she hated eggplant for years because Grandma didn't know how to cook eggplant correctly. Most vegetables, including carrots, eggplant, lima beans, beets, peas, bell peppers, and yes, even brussels sprouts, can be made to taste good, usually with very little effort, as long as you get them fresh.

On the other hand, if you had said CAROB tastes like dirt, I'd be right there with ya.

" Which just goes to show: if you put enough sugar in something, even the most revolting, repellent, repulsive, sickening, nauseating, stomach-churning, stomach-turning, off-putting, unpalatable, distasteful, foul, nasty, vomitous vegetable known to man can be super duper yummy."

When someone manages to come up with a Brussels sprout cake that follows this assumption, then I will agree. ;)

oh John, you are priceless. I'm so glad to have cakewrecks to enjoy your and Jen's humor.

At first, i agreed with Anony M. that it's the lima bean. but i guess the carrot's ubiquitousness makes it the "obnoxious" second cousin. I like them, but i feel your pain, man. If you come over to our place for dinner, I promise, i'll never serve you carrots.

I could not agree with you more. Carrots are disgusting. They only thing more evil are peppers!!!! The taste of peppers cannot be disguised even with copious amounts of delicious cream cheese frosting.

I like carrots--raw, cooked, or in cake. I have an awesome recipe for carrot cake that has mini chocolate chips in it...oh, now I want cake. I have to agree with "Anonymous" at 9:36 AM about lima beans...or any fibrous bean with a tough skin. Kidney beans, blech. I'm not fond of peas, either; they're all mushy and nasty.

As for the second cake, I think that a lot of you have dirty minds. I saw "carob," which is also offensive, but nowhere near in the same league. :-P

Count me amongst the piggies that think that the "Canb" cake was really trying to insult some poor unknowing vixen with sweetness. And for me -- the title of the post is my favorite reference, and one of my very favorite lines from "Robin Hood: Men in Tights." (I *hate* that guy!)

Interestingly, the whole point of carrot cake is that it lets you use less sugar. Carrot cakes became popular during war-time sugar rationing.

Carrots are themselves a pretty rich sugar source, and their sweetness is greatly enhanced when they are baked. During rationing, baking a carrot cake meant you could have cake and still have sugar left over for your tea or coffee.

Wow... I feel like the evil witch. I love carrots but I get them fresh from the farmer's market folks so I guess I'm spoiled. They can be so very tasty on their own and even better in a fresh juice with apples. Mmm. I love carrot cake but I became a picky little snot after I had the world's best carrot cake in a little place in Crockett, CA. The Valona Deli has the best and I've been searching for some comparable for about seventeen years now.

HOW DARE YOU!? carrot cake is delicious and marvelous and the more sugar you add to it to "mask"it the worst the cake is. Because carrots have a natural sweetness that comes out so well in a cake. And I'm not an old person either!!!! but I do like ur blog ;)LOL

I couldn't agree more - carrots taste just like dirt. Every Thanksgiving my (bless his dead-tastebuds heart) husband insists on making his mom's famous "candied carrots." Blech! They do NOT taste "like butter and brown sugar." They taste like dirt - I mean, carrots!

I mean, seriously, it's stringy, bitter, and only SLIGHTLY tolerable when chopped into itty-bitty bits and mixed into some poor unsuspecting salad.

No amount of sugar and/or frosting can salvage the flavor of this terrible stuff. Whenever my daughter is watching Wonder Pets, and it gets to the end where they say "this calls for some celery!Mmmmmmm!" I actually gag a little.

Ah, come on, carrots are yummy and delicious - especially as compared with, say, parsnips! Now there is a *vomitous vegetable*! Ogden Nash said *The parsnip, children, I repeat, is simply an anaemic beet*... evidently he couldn't persuade his kids to eat 'em either. Cooking parsnips will perfume your kitchen worse than broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower cooked together. With a side of liver & onions.

I just made two cakes (one chocolate cake, one spice cake) each with a full cup of pureed beets. The chocolate one also had a cup of shredded zucchini and a cup of shredded carrots. Talk about hiding the "vegedevils"... No one suspected a thing! They were delicious! To find the recipes, go to allrecipes.com

Normally, I would not beg to differ but I feel I should stick up for the lowly carrot. Raw carrots are delightful - crunchy, vitamin-rich and crazily orange. Cook them, however, and they spew forth a taste best described as "ptooey". By the logic you propose, a cake based on turnips would be lovely if just laden with enough sugar and plastered with cream cheese frosting. And we all know THAT ain't true.

I actually love carrot cake too, but boy do they ever taste like dirt. Right on again, with another fantastic blog!! Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw a much more repulsive word than carrot in that second picture!

Aw, I love carrots, although I've never really cared for carrot cake. I will grant that good carrot cake is, well, good, but there are some shoddy attempts out there, and not just the ones you featured.

But we have a good family friend who detest, abhors, and hates, hates, HATES carrots with a passion, so I had to laugh while reading this post. Actually, I think I'll have to send it to her. She'll agree with John wholeheartedly.

Twenty years ago my neighbor in Newark, Delaware had a block party. Our adjoining fenced-in back yards were connected by a gate, and it came to pass that the adults of the neighborhood settled into his yard, drinking and smoking and chatting, while the children came into my yard, playing in and around my garden. My carrots were just ready to be picked, so we carefully pulled a few and washed them off with a garden hose. A few adventurous younger children tried them and learned that fresh-picked, tender carrots are sweeter than candy and taste nothing like the wooden replicas sold in supermarkets.

The next January was a cold and snowy one. I didn't have a car, so I was taking my bicycle down to the post office to mail a large and bulky package. Several of the neighborhood children were out in the street, playing in the snow. One of them, a little four-year-old boy, approached me and said something. Bundled up as he was, I couldn't make out what he said. He repeated himself more clearly.

i like carrots pretty well, but i don't munch on raw ones. i'm not actually a fan of cake in general, but i love carrot cake. the chicken soup recipe i base off of says to use 3 carrots -- i use 2 pounds (similarly with the celery, which i don't munch on raw either). and carrot juice mixed 50/50 with orange juice is yummy yummy yummy! and there's plenty of vegetables i *don't* like.

but bell peppers, which someone doesn't like, oh i could eat ripe ones raw all day long! and the green ones are good lightly stir-fried in the right dishes.

Oh, good LORD, why do I have to intervene when people keep posting information that is so clearly WRONG! The most disgusting, vomitous, inedible, vile, gag-eous, cack-tasting vegetable is demonstrably, indisputably, legally defined as the Brussel's Sprout. [*shuddder*]. the only vegetable you can eat, that tastes like it's already been eaten! (Love carrot cake, though!)

I was gonna yell at you for not loving the wonderful carrot. But now I'm crushed to discover that, after all the geekiness, grammar-nazi-ing, and all-around intellect displayed in this blog, you are, in fact, a Mac user.... My heart is broken.

I haven't read the 151 comments, but I'm gonna throw in my 2 cents anyway. You must have had rotten carrots or only THOUGHT you were eating carrots when you were eating something like a RAW POTATO if you think they taste like dirt. Carrots are a SWEET vegetable (so much so that I have to limit them on my low carb diet).

Hm, as I read this and the rest of the comments, I am in fact eating lima beans, carrots, and peas. I don't suppose I missed any expressions of distaste for corn and green beans too? Seeing as how that would cover everything in my frozen veggie mix.

I only like carrot cake if it doesn't have raisins in it. Nuts are fine, I suppose, but when I make it myself I prefer to leave both out.

Me thinks Jen has carrots mixed up with PARSNIPS! Parsnips are TRULY evil! They taste like ICK and look like anemic carrots! Every time I think of them I think of being made to sit at the table until I finished them, which sometimes took HOURS! Every time I think of them I get ANGRY! I HATE PARSNIPS!

Normally I love carrot cake but these I think would make me reconsider. Especially the phony red velvet cakes lol. I love red velvet so I would cry if I bit into that and got carrot cake. Talk about a waste of money. Then there are the blue carrots..I don't even want to know what happened to make them blue.

Are you seriously worried about offending carrot cake lovers, but not carrot lovers? Umm, hello?? Just because YOU don't like carrots doesn't mean you have the right to insult it like that. Some people, like me, LOVE carrots! Why do you think stores sell them in the first place? Because some people actually LIKE them.

Carrot cake is nice, but "Cirreb' cake (as it looks to me) or cakes with phalic carrots imbedded on the icing is not how I want my cake presented to me. Perhaps the old saying "Less is more" is definately a good statement in this case.

I quite enjoy carrots and have never noticed anything "dirt-like" in their flavor. I was surprised to see so much consensus on the matter.

I love me a good carrot cake. I kind of want some right now.

However, cooking carrots to mush in butter and sugar/honey is just wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. In fact, cooking carrots at all--unless in a cake--seems to destroy their properties of yum. But nothing reverses it to "yuck" for me like making them go gooshy with gag-inducing levels of sugar.

I'm with the first anonymous poster.. Lima beans are truly the most disgusting vegetable! At least you can put carrots in a cake without ruining it, wouldn't you agree? Lima bean cake would taste like the apocalypse. (And I like carrots, especially with ranch dressing. My grandma grows them... pull 'em, rinse 'em, eat 'em! :D )

Carrots are sweet and delicious. Maybe it's the type of carrots you buy. The massive thick ones that come in 3lb bags are no good. You need younger, fresher carrots. Not baby-cut carrots though! They are deceitful, they could be cut from any old wizened carrot!

LOL! While we’re all hatin’ on veggies, nothing would taste more like dirt to me than the radish. Actually, I think dirt would taste better. I think they are the obnoxious uncle that keeps asking you to pull his finger (because if you did, that smell would taste like a radish *sorry for that*). My hubby plants radishes each year. I tried one - just to see if my taste buds changed – nope. Spit it right out. Vile bile. Blech. I agree that veggies taste best steamed or stir-fried, but I don’t think that would help the radish. Drowning them in salad dressing doesn’t help either.

From reading your blog daily, I think I understand what may have happened with the last cake. See, the bakery manager wrote CARROT on an order slip to let the decorator know what to write on the cakes (plural because there was more than one wreck there), but unfortunately, the pen ran out of ink on the first “R”, making it look like a “K”. Plus, there must have been enough of a gap between the 2 “R”s to have the wreckerator think that they were supposed to write CAK ROT.

I've wondered why bakers always pipe a carrot on carrot cakes. Thanks for enlightening me about the "law". ;-)You've gotta love sugar and fat, it can even turn zucchini (which my grandma grows TONS of every year, even though noone in the family likes it) into edible zucchini bread.

I personally have no issues with carrots, but my friend hates them. in fact, she hates all vegetables but thats a whole different story. In science class once we had to eat the (I don't know, it wasn't my idea). I spent the entire class convincing her to take a bite off that carrot. When she did, she chewed for like 20 seconds before almost throwing up all over me and spitting the carrot pieces into a paper towel. Ahhh memories

WAIT!! Are you saying that you don't like carrots? Because I almost got that from the rant at the end, but I just want to be sure.... No carrots for you? So... if you every come to dinner at my house I should not serve you carrots? Just cake. Done.

Carrots at best taste like dirt? You've been eating the wrong carrots! Buy a bunch of organic, slender, crisp ones with the green tops (remove tops once at home). Taste the sweet fresh taste of a good carrot!

I am so shocked that only 3 other people caught the Men in Tights reference! Does this mean I am getting old and out of tune? Decidedly un-orange huge kudos come your way, John, for producing a wonderful mish-mash of pop culture references and wit. And eat your carrots.

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